Buy this book, End Malaria, and your $20 will go to buy some mosquito nets, which I guess they don’t have enough of in Africa. Seems simple enough.

The thing is, they know for a fact that mosquito nets will protect children and others from the mosquitoes that carry malaria. It’s a simply preventable disease that no one should have to endure. Especially when a lot of us could skip a lunch for $20 and help those less fortunate.

And if you do it today, you’ll be a part of End Malaria Day, where the book will reach #1 on Amazon and save 4 million lives.

Your meetings are ineffective and waste a lot of time and resources. Decisions take way too long to get made.

Solution:

Implement the Modern Meeting Standard.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, the latest best selling book on Amazon is Al Pittampalli’s, Read This Before Our Next Meeting. And it is taking the corporate meeting culture by storm.

Al unabashedly declares that meetings are a cancer that is eating our productivity, progress, and overall morale throughout corporate America, and he is here to cure us.

His book is a manifesto on meetings where he declares what’s obviously wrong, and then presents an alternative called The Modern Meeting Standard.

This new standard of meetings is based on several principles that we know in our heart are true. And yet, we still fall victim to decades of learned behavior. It’ll be hard to change, so we need to help each other.

The Domino Project has put together a handful of goodies to help us in this journey to a better way. Here they are in summary:

You want to create something meaningful. Something that will make a difference. Something that people will find valuable. But you just can’t seem to produce. You can’t seem to find the time, you can’t come up with the right concept, you don’t have the right skills, or a myriad of other reasons. You’re stuck in a rut.

‘The work’ in this case is overcoming the ‘Resistance’, a real internal force that keeps you from doing things that matter.

It’s easy to do all kinds of stuff that aren’t of much significance – watch TV, browse twitter or YouTube, play video games, or surf the web. But as soon as you want to do something worthwhile or that has meaning, the Resistance emerges to make it difficult. It’s a natural force of opposition that occurs in proportion to the amount of impact your creation can have if it exists. And sometimes the Resistance is so subtle that you hardly notice it.

That is when it is the most powerful.

You will be able to come up with very valid excuses for why you shouldn’t create that meaningful thing right now. Oh, you’re going to do it someday, it’s just not the right time right now. The Resistance doesn’t have to convince you that your idea is ridiculous, it only has to keep you from doing it for one more day. You see how powerful that is?

Once you are able to name it, and recognize its powerful tactics, you now have a chance to fight it.

So that is what Steven Pressfield has done for us. As a successful author experiencing all the usual ups and downs of an artist, he discovered this tangible force that would fight against his efforts. Then, he exposed all of the characteristics and qualities of this beast in his book The War of Art.

This book has motivated many artists to create, including Seth Godin, who said that it had the most significant impact on him than any other book. And it shows in the way Seth builds on the concept in his latest books, Linchpin and Poke the Box.

You too can get better acquainted with the Resistance, so you can fight it convincingly, by getting a free copy (until May 18th, 2011) of Steven’s latest book called Do The Work. It’s for the Kindle edition, which anyone can purchase and read on their smart phone or computer – you don’t need a Kindle.

The free-ness is due to Seth’s Domino Project and the sponsorship of GE (General Electric).

There are a lot of exciting new ideas and concepts that you are learning from books, TED talks, blogs, and a myriad of other sources out there on the internet. But then you come to work at your corporation and everything seems to be backwards, you feel like you’re in some kind of a bubble, where no one knows what is going on in the outside world.

Solution

Start a book club. There are actually other people at your corporation who do know about some of the same things you are learning, but you would never know because there is no forum for sharing brave new ideas. So start one.

Book clubs are an easy, non-threatening way to explore new concepts. Plus, they hardly take any preparation time. Schedule a few meetings a couple weeks apart, divide the book into sections, read those sections before each meeting and develop a few discussion questions from that section. You’ll find that once you get people talking about an interesting subject (to them), you can’t stop them.

Nothing is more powerful than ideas.

So your book clubs can be a breeding ground for innovative ideas to sprout and grow, because they can be nourished and fed by good discussion and refinement.

What do you want? Change?

Then you’ll have to start a movement.

And to start a movement, you’ll need a compelling idea.

And to have a compelling idea, you’ll need lots of ideas.

And to get lots of ideas you’ll need to read a lot of books.

And to read a lot of books, you’ll either need to go to the library, or the bookstore, or sign up for the free newsletter that is changing the book publishing industry: http://www.thedominoproject.com/[If you do it this week, Seth will drop the price of Poke the Box $1 for each 5,000 sign-ups.]

So get reading and start a book club.

P.S. Sorry I didn’t list 10 ways to spread ideas. I gave you one. You’ll have to come up with the rest yourself.